Hadronic Contributions to the Anomalous Magnetic Moment of the Muon from Lattice QCD

The Standard Model of Particle Physics describes three of the four known fundamental interactions: the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, the electromagnetic interaction, and the weak interaction. While the Standard Model is extremely successful, we know that it is not a complete description of nature. One way to search for physics beyond the Standard Model lies in the measurement of precision observables. The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon \(a_\mu \equiv \frac{1}{2}(g-2)_\mu \), quantifying the deviation of the gyromagnetic ratio from the exact value of 2 predicted by the Dirac equation, is one such precision observable. It exhibits a persistent discrepancy of 3.5 standard deviations between the direct measurement and its theoretical prediction based on the Standard Model. The total uncertainty of 0.5 ppm of this prediction is dominated by effects of the strong interaction, notably the contributions from hadronic vacuum polarisation and from hadronic light-by-light scattering. In this project we address some of the leading systematic uncertainties in a first principles determination of these contributions using Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics.